You can either order a new test from scratch for an introductory price of US $149 or you can transfer your raw data from AncestryDNA, Family Tree DNA or 23andMe to order a GPS Origins report for $59. The transfer is not currently active and is advertised as "coming soon".

Here is a description of the test from the home page of the company website:

The GPS Origins™ (Geographic Population Structure) ancestry test uses the latest genetic research and a new ancestral tracking technique to pinpoint much more precisely where your DNA was formed. The GPS Origins™ test indicates the town or village where groups of your ancestors from different cultures met - building a rich picture of the migration journeys that formed your deep genealogical heritage.

The GPS Origins™ test then traces the migration route of your DNA back to where it originated from and dated the age of your DNA signature. It does that for both your maternal and paternal lineages indicating where your DNA began. Your results are detailed in a report that reveals your ancestral origins.

Your personalized report identifies your top three Ancestral Origins (the Gene Pools or ancestral communities that contributed significant portions of your genetic makeup) and shows the percentages of DNA you inherited from each. The report is much more detailed than an estimate of ‘ethnicity’.

Your story starts with the shared origin of all humankind, and then builds into a vibrant picture of where and how your ancestors lived, and the conditions that led them to migrate. Your report contains maps illustrating the two most important migration journeys and describes how your ancestors’ circumstances changed as they crossed continents to find better lives. The report concludes with a summary page of helpful links to discover additional information to reveal your ancestral origins...

The GPS Origins™ test is a revolutionary ancestry test that enables you to trace where your DNA was formed over 1,000 years ago, along with its migration routes, down to the nearest village or town.

Current ancestry DNA tests locate where your DNA formed within countries or continents. Typically you find that some of your ancestries come from Western Europe, Africa or South Asia, and given broad estimates of your ethnicity. These tests generally cannot identify your origins to particular countries or locations.

In a recent interdisciplinary study, Das and co-authors have
attempted to trace the homeland of Ashkenazi Jews and of their historical
language, Yiddish (Das et al. 2016. Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to Primeval
Villages in the Ancient Iranian Lands of Ashkenaz. Genome Biology and
Evolution). Das and co-authors applied the geographic population structure
(GPS) method to autosomal genotyping data and inferred geographic coordinates
of populations supposedly ancestral to Ashkenazi Jews, placing them in Eastern Turkey.
They argued that this unexpected genetic result goes against the widely
accepted notion of Ashkenazi origin in the Levant, and speculated that Yiddish
was originally a Slavic language strongly influenced by Iranian and Turkic
languages, and later remodeled completely under Germanic influence. In our
view, there are major conceptual problems with both the genetic and linguistic
parts of the work. We argue that GPS is a provenancing tool suited to inferring
the geographic region where a modern and recently unadmixed genome is most
likely to arise, but is hardly suitable for admixed populations and for tracing
ancestry up to 1000 years before present, as its authors have previously
claimed. Moreover, all methods of historical linguistics concur that Yiddish is
a Germanic language, with no reliable evidence for Slavic, Iranian, or Turkic
substrata.

The typology of Yiddish and the name Ashkenaz cannot serve as arguments to support the theory put forward by Das et al. (2016). (Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to primeval villages in the ancient Iranian lands of Ashkenaz. Genome Biol Evol. 8:1132–1149.) that the origin of Ashkenazic Jews can be located in ancient Iran. Yiddish is a Germanic, not a Slavic language. The history of the use of the term Ashkenaz from the Middle Ages onward is well documented. Ashkenazic Jewry is named for the Hebrew and Yiddish designation for Germany, originally a Biblical term.

The new GPS Origins test is therefore based on an unproven methodology, which can't be replicated and which does not produce the village-level or even country-level accuracy that has been claimed. It is merely giving you geographical co-ordinates which represent an average of your closest matches in a reference database of modern populations. The whole concept of the test is fatally flawed because it is simply not possible to use the DNA of living people to identify at an individual level where your DNA originated 1000 or more years ago. Similarly we cannot trace the individual migration journeys of our ancestors from modern DNA. Ancient DNA is providing interesting new insights about past populations but these inferences apply to everyone's ancestors and are not unique to an individual.

The new test does seem to have some "improvements" compared to the old Prosapia test. Rather than providing one co-ordinate to represent the origins of your ancestors it would appear that the new test will provide a place of origin for both parents. Presumably this opens up the possibility of customers having origins in two rivers or oceans instead of just one!

If anyone does get results from this test I would be interested to hear from you and to see a sample report.

Further controversies
It should be noted that Eran Elhaik has been at the centre of a number of controversies in recent years.

Mendez et al published a robust rebuttal Reply to 'The extremely ancient' chromosome that isn't' by Elhaik et al (European Journal of Human Genetics, 2013) pointing out that the authors' criticisms resulted from "a misunderstanding of population genetic theory, as well as a misrepresentation of the methodology of Mendez et al". They also discussed the "technical and conceptual flaws" that undermined the claims.

You're using David "KKK" Duke as evidence as to why Elhaik's research can't be trusted? Is this a joke?

If you want to make an arguments against Elhaik's research, fine. But if you think David Duke's arguments, which include "Elhaik is a Jewish last name" has any merit in the scientific field, then you should seek help.

I only included David Duke's post because it cited lots of the studies that have refuted Elhaik's hypothesis. I'd never heard of Duke before. However, the papers that I've cited in this blog post and the papers that Duke lists speak for themselves.

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The material on these pages is copyright Debbie Kennett or reproduced with permission from other copyright owners. It may be downloaded and printed for personal reference, but not otherwise copied, altered in any way or transmitted to others (unless explicitly stated otherwise) without the written permission of Debbie Kennett.